a b c d Sarah Karush, "Dracula yarn could be summer's hot novel", San Jose Mercury News (2 June 2005). Helen falls into a depression, worrying that the vampire bite she sustained will contaminate her daughter.

Elizabeth Kostova

The Historian starts with the unnamed narrator, the 16-year-old daughter of a US diplomat based in Amsterdam, pulling the Kama Sutra and another relic of a book from the top shelf of her father's library.The only remnants of his power are the few close hangers on, the few douchebags foolish enough to cling onto the remains of a long-diminished power. The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known - and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. Little, Brown and Company heavily promoted the book and it became the first debut novel to become number one on The New York Times bestseller list in its first week on sale. The novel's tone and structure place it within the serious literary tradition for which Kostova was aiming. Readers who think the legend of Dracula has become a trite staple of schlock fiction will find this atmospheric page-turner by first-time author Kostova a bloodthirsty delight.

The Historian (Audiobook on 22 CDs): Elizabeth Kostova The Historian (Audiobook on 22 CDs): Elizabeth Kostova

As an historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. The family lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1972, while her father was teaching at a local university; during that year, the family traveled across Europe.The woman turns out to be Helen Rossi, Bartholomew’s daughter, who has become an expert on the lore of Dracula. The Historian is the first debut novel to become number one on the New York Times bestsellers list in its first week on the shelf. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. I find myself thinking of my mother's comment after she read the Da Vinci Code, that it was ok but she knew many other books that were written much better that should be best sellers. The realisation that an American grad student would experience some difficulty travelling in the Soviet bloc in 1951, and that nice girls still wore gloves then, seems to be more or less the limit of the author's historical sense.

The Historian - Rotten Tomatoes The Historian - Rotten Tomatoes

But then came Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code: a mystery involving an American academic who is caught up in a bookish historical drama with a foreign love interest.I may now never know if either of them viewed The Historian as an attempt to capitalize on the fad of Dan Brown-style mysteries and the vampire genre!